Ignorance

by Michèle Roberts (Bloomsbury)

This novel, set in a small French town during the Second World War, centers on the lives of two girls: Jeanne, the daughter of a widowed Jew who converted to Catholicism, and Marie-Angèle, whose family owns the village store. When Jeanne’s mother falls ill, Jeanne is sent to the local convent. There she makes mischief with Marie-Angèle, tolerates the nuns’ cruelties, and meets a Jewish outcast who teaches her to draw and takes advantage of her innocence. Class and religious divisions, amplified by the war’s violence, realign neighbors and disrupt Jeanne’s alliance with Marie-Angèle, seeding misunderstanding and betrayal on all sides. The story is told from various points of view, enabling Roberts to give us complementary accounts of each character’s hypocrisy and moral failings. But her repetitions, intended to convey narrative instability, fall short of offering a satisfactory portrait of a town during the war. ♦

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day